CHAPTER XVI.

HUGH and his mamma returned next day; the red and brown leaves were
whirling and dancing about, and the tree‐arms were creaking and grinding.
Standing listlessly by my boudoir window, about four o'clock, I see the family
coach and the bays coming with slow majesty though the park.

Hugh in his brown great‐coat driving; our parent uprighhter than one of her own
knitting needles, and her femme de chambre
inside; the valet and the footman in the dickey. Here they all are! welcome,
welcome home! I had spent the last night, lying all along upon the earth, as
David did when he was interceding for the life of his little son. I was
interceding for the sparing of no life; I was but
page: 223 interceding for the taking away of my own. The rough
west wind kept dashing the ivy sprays against the window pane, and I lay with my
face buried in the deep piled carpet, while my darling went away from me through
the night; went away forlornly, in his soaked pilot coat, with his dripping
golden hair, and his true desolate heart.

As for Dolly, I had made up my mind about her. She had sown, and she was about to
reap; she had laboured, and she was about to enter upon the reward of her
labours.

“No! that she shall not! so help me God!” I cry out in my rage and
pain, and the dying fire gives one sleepy flicker of surprise at my vehemence. I
would go to Hugh, and would tell him all. I had been dishonest to him all along;
I would be honest now; I had been sailing under false colours; now
I would run up my own black pirate flag. I would go to him, and tell him all my
little bitter story; I would hide no detail; gloss over none of my own vast
page: 224 wickedness. I would tell him how I had thrown
myself into that other man's arms, and begged him with tears and prayers
earnester than ever mother sent up in behalf of her dying child, to take me away
with him, to make me utterly vile and enormously happy. And I would also tell
him—for to this, that other anecdote would be but the necessary
preface, of my sister's ingenious and newly discovered accomplishment of
imitating her neighbour's handwriting; an accomplishment which would have
twisted her graceful neck a hundred years ago.

Hugh would turn me out of doors of course. I was fully prepared for that; I
should not think it the least severe of him. I could see the old woman sweeping
away her stiff lavender satin from contact with me, and looking at me with her
stern Puritan eyes, as the Pharisees long ago, under the blue Palestine sky,
looked at the woman, to whom our dear Lord Christ said, “Neither do I condemn
thee!” I should be turned out of doors, and should have to go about begging
my
page: 225 my bread, in greenish rags and a
whine.

There was almost a relief in the idea; it would be a fit expiation for my crime.
Moreover, what hardships, what ignominy, what painfullest, lingeringest death,
would not I have embraced laughing, to have baulked Dolly of the
pay for which she had so diligently served her master, the Devil. Cowardly,
chicken‐hearted woman as I was—and there were few more so between the three
seas,—terrifiedly as I had always shrunk from physical pain; in that first
frenzy of agonized hate, I would have hung all day beneath an Eastern sky,
nailed hand and foot to a cross, while soul and body parted slowly—slowly—in
unimagined anguish, would have been sawn asunder, stoned, burnt, readily, yea,
most joyfully, if thereby I could have purchased for myself the power to be
fitly revenged on her who had turned the jocund garden of my young life into a
desolate wilderness.

“I will tell him to‐day—to‐morrow.”
page: 226 I say to
myself, as I stand drumming with my fingers on the sill, and watching my own
fine carriage, the carriage for which I have paid the longest price ever
carriage fetched, sweeping dignifiedly up to my own Hall door. Hugh helps his
mother out dutifully—“my boy” is a good son—and then I hear him coming running
upstairs three steps at a time.

“Well, old girl, how are you? Why did not you come down to meet us? I was looking
out for you at the Hall door.”

“Very glad to get home again,” says Hugh, pulling off his dogskin gloves, and
precipitating himself into a minute cane arm‐chair; for, if you remark, men
always select the smallest chair they can find to deposit their persons upon. “I
wish my neighbours all the good in the world, but I don't seem to care how
little I see of them now‐a‐days.”

“Don't you?” with a feeble smile.

“Next time anyone invites me to his
page: 227 house, I
think I shall say ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come,’ eh,
Nell” (I have turned a wife out of doors, and therefore I cannot come, will be a
more valid excuse, I think bitterly). “I say, Nell, what do you say to running
downstairs, and saying something civil to the old lady; I suppose it would be a
proper attention, wouldn't it? and old people are such sticklers for their
dignity.”

“Oh, yes—oh, to be sure—I was forgetting!” I cry, and I turn to go and greet my
“mother,” while Hugh follows me.

We find the old dowager sitting in the library; she has not yet laid aside her
toga, and is reading her letters.

“I hope you have had a pleasant visit,” I say, rather timidly.

“Charming, my dear, charming!” (rustling her letter, and giving me a fond but
prickly kiss. It is a dreadful thing living in the house with two moustaches
nearly related to you, I find). My version of the little touching hymn to our
mammas, that
page: 228 we all commit to memory in early
life would be
“Who ran to help me when I fell,And kissed the place and stabbed it well,My mother.”
“They always arrange their parties so nicely, no mixtures; one never runs
any risk there of having any of these nouveaux
riches forced willy nilly upon one; the dear Bishop, and Lord and
Lady Brandreth—oh, by‐the‐by, Lady Brandreth asked a great deal about you, was
so sorry to miss the opportunity of making your acquaintance; we must positively
return her call next week, my dear.”

“Yes, certainly, if you wish.” (By next week, I shall have assumed the greenish
rags and the whine.)

I did not tell Hugh on that day, nor on the day after, nor on the day after that.
Do not we all know, how without having faltered in our resolution to do a
disagreeable thing, we keep putting it off, from one day to another. And
meanwhile, the said excellent Hugh pursued the even
page: 229 tenor of his way, doing his duty to God and to man,
according to his own ideas of what those duties were. Went to church and read
“Bell's Life” on Sundays; hunted, and drained, and liquid‐manured, and
steam‐ploughed on week days.

As for the little tiffs in his seraglio—for little tiffs there were even in those
early days, little tiffs there must always be, when an old woman and a young one
hold divided sway—as long as they were not obtruded on his notice, he treated
them with the sublime indifference with which Zeus, the cloud compeller, resting
on the topmost peak of Olympus, or going to have a snug dinner with the
Ethiopians, might have treated a squabble between those two arrant shrews,
cow‐eyed Here, and gray‐eyed Athene.

If my eyes were red, why it was the east wind, or a touch of influenza. If I did
not talk, why he concluded philosophically that I had nothing to say, or at
least nothing to say on the subject that he was wont to delight in. For be it
known that Sir
page: 230 Hugh was in the habit of
keeping a hobby horse, saddled and bridled in his mind's stable; and on this
docile animal he frequently cantered up and down, and took healthful exercise.
As often as not, this hobby horse was some pet grievance, which went to sleep
and underwent decent burial, as long as the hunting and training and liquid
manuring were in full force, but was resurrectionized whenever they were found
insufficient to employ all the powers of his intellect.

At present the grievance was a projected railway, that was to intersect a part of
his property. It was to run only for about a mile and a half through one or two
outlying farms, and it was of no earthly disadvantage to him or his, and he knew
it; and yet to hear him talk, you would have imagined that it involved the ruin
of the whole Lancastria Gens.

“It is too bad!” he is saying now, in a quasi‐injured voice, as he sits cracking
walnuts at his comfortable dinner table; “one cannot call a foot of one's
property one's own now‐a‐days; one can never be
page: 231 safe from having one's land cut up by these rascally projectors, for their
beastly lines that nobody wants.”

“Disgraceful!” echoes the acquiescent Dowager, who like lovely Thais, sits beside
him, with her head unlike lovely Thais, I imagine, crowned with one of those
weird erections of black velvet and steel that old women delight in. “I suppose
it is all these dreadful Radicals; I'm sure I don't know what the country is
coming to; I suppose they will bring their horrid railways through one's
drawing‐room next.”

“It's such a confounded swindle!” pursues Hugh, applying the nutcrackers
viciously to a walnut as if it had been a director's head; “the merest bubble!
only people are such fools; they will be taken in, try as one may to open their
eyes; and if they do get it—and they won't get it so easy as they think,
I can tell them—it will never pay them sixpence in the
pound.”

“Won't it, dear?” say I, starting into sudden interest, for I imagined that my
page: 232 husband addressed his last remark more
particularly to me; but I am mistaken, it is only that having finished his
walnuts, his eyes are gazing straight before him, and consequently, unavoidably
take me in in their range of vision.

“Don't you remember, mother,” he goes on, after a few minutes devoted to sipping
claret, bringing his eyes to bear on his mamma, and thereby putting his wife off
guard; “don't you remember, they were talking about this line once before, five
years or so ago. There was some sense in it then, because the Tadcaster and
Milton branch was not open then; but when that was opened it did away with all
need for this—for that—I mean, don't you see?”

He ends, for he perceives that the relative pronouns are getting too many for
him.

“These horrid companies get everything their own way now‐a‐days! I declare it is
quite shocking! it seems to me that no one can do anything for themselves in
these days, but must have a company to
page: 233 help
them. We shall be having praying companies, and going to bed companies
soon.”

Our prophetic parent ceases and adjusts her diadem, the point of which is veering
gently round towards her left ear.

“Lord — made such a capital speech in the House yesterday, upon these infernal
railways; shows 'em up so completely, brings 'em down to chapter and verse,
don't you know. I don't care what any one says,” pursues Sir Hugh,
looking round on his harem with a determined air, “but I stick to it, that he is
the best speaker they've got now; out and out, out and out, I
say.”

“Ah!” says the senior occupant of the seraglio, deferentially, “won't you read it
to us, dear Hugh? at least any part of it that you think we could understand; we
should like it so much, should not we, Nelly?”

I again start and blush; I always am starting and blushing of late, and say very
nervously, “Oh, yes, to be sure dear—so much—oh do!”

page: 234

So we migrate to the drawing‐room, and Ariel, alias Tomkins, having fetched to‐day's “Times,” dear Hugh begins
to read through two and a half columns of statements and statistics, and
representations, all gilded by the lambent glow of Lord —'s wit. Meanwhile
“mamma” having assisted her spectacles to mount her long nose, draws her parish
bag towards her, and begins to clothe the naked “hear, hear's” and “cheers,” and
asks the reader is he sure he is not tired, begs him not to make himself hoarse,
and offers to get black currant lozenges for him.

I work too, and do my best to keep my attention somewhere within a mile of those
big sheets; to laugh and express surprise and horror at the right places; not to
laugh where I ought to express horror, not to express horror where I ought to
laugh; and by dint of care and always taking my cue from the dowager, I succeed
admirably. I could not sleep that night for the wind; it kept roaring so, and
groaning in the great Scotch fir close to my bed‐room windows. It shook the
page: 235 window frames, and came banging with impotent
fury against the stout stone walls.

That was a blowy time; many and many a coast was strewn with wrecks
and stranded vessels.

“What an awful night!” my mother‐in‐law had said, as we came up the deep carpeted
stairs to bed, “how thankful we ought to be, my dear, that we have no one dear
to us at sea.”

(Oh yes, so thankful, of course.) What did it matter to us that the “Euryalus”
sailed from Cork for India four days ago, with the —th Dragoons on board. God
help that poor ship to‐night, labouring through a wintry sea, with the great
greenish‐gray waves, with their angry white crests towering high above her
mast‐heads! God help the one passenger that for me that ship contains! The man
in the drenched pilot coat, with the set white face, that day and night I see so
plain, that I shall see when the damps and dews of death are coming dankly down
upon my own.

page: 236

The wind lulls every now and then for a minute or two, to gather fresh strength
for the onset; then comes tearing, howling, shrieking like a hundred lost
spirits over the wintry wolds. Oh God! he'll be drowned! he'll be drowned!
perhaps he is drowned already! perhaps the crabs and scrawls, and noisome,
shapeless sea beasts are already gnawing at the heart what beat with such
passionate agony against mine a week ago.

Towards morning the hurricane moderates, and I fall asleep heavily, and dream
confusedly of churchyards, and of my father as alive again, while yet I know
somehow all the while that he is dead—of tombs and drowned men. I sleep on late,
and my eyelids are purple, and my eyes look as if they had been put in with a
dirty finger, when I go down late—a great crime at Wentworth—to breakfast.

“I hope you have not waited; I'm so sorry!” I say apologetically, as I make my
tardy entrance.

“I think, my dear, that it would be as well if you could try and be down for
page: 237 family prayers,” says Lady Lancaster,
stiffly; “it is a bad example for the servants when the mistress is absent, and
it is no great hardship to be dressed by nine o'clock; at least it used not to
be considered so in my young days.”

“Come, come, mother, we must not be too hard upon her,” says Hugh, taking my hand
fondly, “she is not so tough as we old stagers are; and the wind kept her awake,
poor little woman! she is half asleep still, isn't she?”

To prevent any wrangling over my unprayerful spirit, I betake myself to my
letters, which are lying in a little heap beside my plate. My correspondence is
not of much interest generally. The first that I take up has a very broad black
edge, ostentatiously broad, like the Pharisees' phylacteries. I look at the
hand‐writing, frown, tear it open, and read. It does not take long reading.

“My dear Nelly,—As you and dear Hugh, to whom I can
never be sufficiently grateful, have been so kind as
page: 238 to offer me a home, I write to ask if you will allow
me to take shelter there, early next week. I trust that my coming will be no
annoyance to dear Lady Lancaster, but indeed I shall try hard to be in nobody's
way.

“Your affectionate sister,

“DOROTHEA LESTRANGE.”

The evil day has come then; the match must be put to the train of gunpowder,
which is to blow the reputation of the Lestranges, and the domestic peace and
honour of the Lancasters into the air. Shortly after breakfast I go and knock,
with trembling knuckles, at the door of Hugh's snuggery, where he and his
bailiff hold their Witenagemotes, and transact the affairs of the Wentworth
nation.

“May I come in, Hugh?”

“Come in! of course you may!”

I enter.

“What do you mean by knocking, Nell? have you forgotten that uncommon cold day,
not so long ago, when I endowed you with all my worldly goods? I did not
page: 239 make any exception in favour of this sanctum,
did I?”

“I wanted to speak to you,” I say, coming over to the table, with my eyes glued
to the carpet.

“All right! fire away! only come a bit closer to the fire, and don't stand there
looking like a little undertaker's assistant.”

“I have heard from Dolly!”

“Oh! we shall have to have your tongue slit like a magpie's, Nell, to make you
talk a bit faster; she's coming, I suppose.”

“She wants to come next week.”

“Poor Dolly! I'm sure I shall be very glad to see her; and I suppose you have
come to talk about what rooms she is to have, and that sort of thing; but you
had better settle all that with the old lady; she'll be fit to be tied, if she
is not taken into council.”

I make a great plunge; it is like taking a header into a cold tub on a frosty
morning.

“Hugh!” (twisting a rosary of jet beads that I have about my neck, round my
page: 240 fingers.) “Would you mind my telling her not
to come?”

Hugh opens his brown eyes very wide, wider than ever Providence intended those
windows to his worthy soul to be thrown open.

“Tell her not to come! after having offered her a home, to slink out of it; leave
her, poor girl, without a roof to shelter her pretty head in! why, Nell, you
must be joking!”

“Joking!” I cry, passionately; “if you knew all, you would not think it a joking
matter. I cannot breathe in the same house with her!”

Hugh comes over, and pulls me down on the sofa beside him. “You must have a slate
off this morning, Nell! wind blew it off last night! Ha! Ha! cannot breathe in
the same house with your only sister! such a big house too; you
must require a deal of fresh air! you have been squabbling by
post, I suppose!”

“It's no case of squabbling!” I say, very earnestly, while I feel my white cheeks
getting crimson; “oh, Hugh, I
page: 241 have something
to tell you—something I must tell you—oh, I wish it was not so
hard!”

“If it is anything about Dolly; anything she has done wrong, or any scrape she
has got into, I don't seem to care about hearing about it!” says Hugh. “I
daresay she'd sooner I didn't, you know, and there is no use crying over spilt
milk.”

“It's about myself, too!” I say, in great agitation.

Hugh puts his kind arm round me, and looks with incredulous amused eyes at my
half averted face. “Some dreadful crime you have been committing, eh? not said
‘Amen’ loud enough in church, or pitched into Bentham, for giving your back hair
a tug?”

There is nothing on earth that Hugh hates so much as a scene, and he fears that
one is imminent. “I've got something to tell you too,” he says, cheerily, rising
and walking towards his escritoire;
page: 242 “and as
mine seems to be the pleasantest piece of news, I'll have it out first;
yours will keep, I'm sure!”

I remain sitting on the sofa where he left me, twisting my hands about, and
wishing, oh how heartily! that this confession, of the gravity of which my
husband is so utterly unsuspecting, were well over, and I turned out of doors
once for all. Presently he comes back with a small red leather case in his hand,
and sits down again beside me.

“Do you remember, Nell,” he says, composing his jolly face to a decent gravity,
befitting, as he thinks the subject; “do you remember telling me once that you
had nothing but a photograph of—of—your poor father?”

“Yes,” I say, wincing; “don't talk about him!” (nobody ever mentions his name to
me now, I cannot bear it.)

“I won't, I won't!” says Hugh apologetically; “not more than I can help at least,
but I have had this done for you, and I want you to take one look at it, if you
don't mind.”

page: 243

He unfastens the case, takes out a large gold locket, with the monogram A.L. in
diamonds upon it, and after fumbling a little about the spring, opens it with
his big, kind, clumsy fingers.

I look half reluctant, and in an instant the tears come rushing to my eves. I see
again the kind blue eyes; the humorous tender smile that the coffin lid hid away
from me six dreary weeks ago; it is my old man come to life again, only that hat
the artist has painted out half the weary care lines; my old man, as he was
before his troubles, came upon him; as he will be—oh, no! he will look yet
nobler and beautifuller, and peacefuller then—when he comes to meet me at the
golden gates.

I throw my arms round Hugh's neck; it is the first time that I ever kissed him
voluntarily in my life. Poor Hugh! my emotion is hardly of the pleasurable kind
that he had hoped and intended. He looks uneasily concerned, and I see his mouth
forming itself into his favourite whistling shape.

page: 244

“I did not mean to upset you like this, Nell!” he says, by‐and‐by.

“Oh, you are so good to me!” I cry, incoherently; “and I'm not at all good to
you! Oh, I do so wish that I liked you better! I do so wish that I had always
liked you!”

Hugh pats my hair very fondly.

“My dear old woman!” he says, “let bygones be bygones! don't let, us rake up any
old grievances; it don't make much odds if you hated me like poison once, so as
you don't hate me now!”

We sit silent for a few minutes. Hugh whistles ‘Polly Perkins’ very softly to
himself, while doubt and vacillation enter my mind.

My husband's words keep ringing in my ears. “Let bygones be bygones!” Is he
right? Would not it be better to “let the dead past bury its dead?” Have I not
done him enough injury already, coming to him so meanly, taking all his love and
his kind words and caresses, and giving him nothing in return but sour looks and
peevish tears, and dimmed
page: 245 beauty; without
lacerating that honest heart unnecessarily, by telling him that his wife is
unfaithful to him; if not in deed, at least in heart and thought.

The temptation is gone, never to return; why not let that secret remain between
God and my own heart? But if I abandon my confession, I must also abandon my
revenge; the one involves the other.

“I often think,” says Hugh, with more gravity than is his wont, “that one great
cause of there being so much unhappiness in married life is people's expecting
too much of one another, I don't want us to split on that rock, Nell. I should
like you to look a bit happier certainly by‐and‐by; and to seem a bit gladder to
see me, when I come to speak to you, if you can; but if not, why we must rub on
as we are, and I'm very thankful to Providence for having given you to me at
all!”

“Providence made you but a shabby present!” I say, with contrition.

“Not much to brag of, I daresay;”
page: 246 says Hugh
playfully, pulling my ear, “but you see I am easily pleased. Well, I must be
going out; I cannot stop molly‐coddling away half a morning at a foolish little
woman's apron strings; and I say, Nell, you go and talk to the old lady about
Dolly, and drop the poor girl a line to tell her we shall be very glad to see
her any day she likes to come; and don't let me hear any more nonsense about
envy, hatred and malice and all uncharitableness!”

“But I do hate her! I have every reason to hate her! Hugh! Hugh!” I
call after him eagerly, but he has beaten a hasty retreat, to avoid further
discussion of the subject.